Evening Standard from London, Greater London, England • 56

56 MONDAY 20 OCTOBER 1997 Reviews EVENING STANDARD The truth is funnier as fiction We have lift-off but some way to go Theatre Stories Cottesloe National Theatre PATRICK MARMION Ensemble Modem Barbican RICK JONES UNDISPUTED master of the shaggy dog story and once self-appointed king of ridiculously long theatre productions Ken Campbell is still peddling a lot of old material in his one-man show The question is is there something to these yams or has he just run out of ideas? He has for example been flogging a pet theory about the bifurcation of English literature in 1938 for at least 10 years This apocryphal event was when Science Fiction was bound in lurid covers and banished to railway termini Allied to this is the story of his Damascan conversion to the Sci-Fi genre in general and Sci-Fi conferences in particular Then there is the story of how following the success of the Royal Shakespeare Nicholas Nickleby back in the Seventies he contrived to despatch a series of letters to leading theatrical luminaries from the then director of the RSC Trevor Nunn He announced the RSC was to abandon the bard and become the RDC deriving its inspiration from Charles Dickens The main story in this show however concerns the search in the desert for Mthe lost universal once undertaken by revered ex-pat director Peter Brook Where Brook gallantly Med Campbell accidentally stumbles on a potential universal language after advising a fellow thesp that he had a vision that the thesp must see every one of comedian Ken live shows for a year The project took the thesp to the South Pacific where he was not only catapulted to celebrity status among the New Hebridean tribes people but also found a potential universal language pidgin English Unpacking his lifetime's collection of unlikely yams Campbell poses as a beaming amateur the kind of guy you see lurking in public libraries and pray will not button hole you with paranoid fantasies But do not be fooled This chirpy cockney affecting nerdishly nasal whine and sporting a pair of comedy eyebrows on his shaven head is no loon He is in fact an extremely sophisticated perfomer adept at juggling an extraordinary number of convoluted stories to mesmerising effect It is perfectly reasonable to ask whether these stories amount to anything after two-and-a-half hours but the question turns out to be missing the point The mischievous message is that all stories are tall stories and besides all these stories are very good fun and well worth hearing over again Facing fantasies: Ken Campbell in Theatre Stories A flash of inspiration IT IS a pity that the composer Steve Reich and his wife Beryl Korot work so slowly They first mentioned that they were collaborating on Three Tales in 1995 but all that was ready for last night's UK premiere was half (15 minutes' worth) of Act I Still they squeezed a lot in for the Ensemble Modem to perform Hindenburg (Act I) has the makings of a work as powerful as The Cave and last interweaving of song choreography and film (opera by any other name) Korot applies the minimalist technique emphasis by repetition progress by infinitesimal nudges to actual film of both the hydrogen airship Hindenburg which crashed in 1937 and the German President Hindenburg who appointed Hitler Chancellor in 1933 editing prompts provocative questions Did the Nazis blow the ship up deliberately? Why was the death toll so low (21 dead 64 survived)? Is transfixation by lens the natural response of the paparazzi to a tragedy? The contrast between dramatic film and Reich's deadpan nuclear music is chilling Unfortunately (and ironically in view of the script) a last night spoiled the sound's definition obliterated the words and upset the balance Though one had a sense of the potential overall impact it was an inauspicious start One looks forward to the premiere of the completed epic provided it falls within one's lifetime The other pieces were Reich's Proverb which had been pared down clarified and improved since its appearance in a 1995 Prom and Reich's long-winded Music for 18 Musicians which did not warrant the wolf-whistles and cheers it received Jewel Bloomsbury Theatre MAX BELL 0 0 LONDON COURAGE Enjoy a Free Trial of COURAGE HE six-million-album woman came to London and all she got was a lousy gig in a London university student theatre on a misty Sunday night Maybe one of the reasons why Jewel growing coterie of British Ms like her so much Here is a new star bom in the Alaskan tundra who plays dates with Neil Young and Bob Dylan makes records with various Red Hot Chili Peppers (and then ditches them) and is about to screen test for a movie co-starring Leonardo DiCaprio Yet happily get on stage armed with a couple of guitars and a raft of stories that are neither too self-deprecating to be cloying nor so right-on that you are left thinking just another folk-hippy troubadour Jewel is such a striking individual that her natural Swiss-beauty ought to be the first thing you notice about her But God-given charms fade into the background once her knee-knocking stance and a vocal repertoire to match her sundry facial disguises slide into place It is tempting to locate her style in a tradition encompassing familiar names such as Joni Mitchell or Tori Amos but loosen up those straitjackets and she resembles another master of musical disguise and tragi-comic intent Loudon Wainwright The bittersweet route Jewel follows has been taken so often that even those who only travel the American road by proxy start to recognise the signposts luckily she makes enough detours during the sexually explicit Race Car Driver or the almost end-of-the-affair You Were Meant For Me to keep the journey vivid Given that her voice face and physical presence all pass the check factor main asset lies in surpassing the norm Ratings adequate good very good outstanding poor Shame about the dancing Royal Winnipeg Ballet Peacock Theatre ANNE SACKS AT WATERLOO STATION OCTOBER 20th 21st 22nd Offer only open to persons aged 18 years or over Only one trial per person each session whilst stocks last Courage in London OFFIGAL BEER SUPPLIER AN oldest ballet company is visiting London for the first time in a decade as a thriving enterprise with an eclectic repertory 32 dancers and its own school So a shame about the dancing-Dancers moved with an eagerness to please and a certain blunt strength but as the evening unfolded it became apparent there were no poems in these bodies And not too much personality either They were instruments for making words not music In the first of two programmes dancers in George Concerto Barocco were personable enough but bland as they focused on the madly entangled formations and obsessive pointe work Later pieces showed file company subscribes to a style found mainly in North America and Germany that is more about arranging limbs than creating a chain of steps a sort of first cousin to gymnas- tics In this flip-flop choreography women are flipped up so they can flop their feet out Bottoms are raised to the audience Dancers hunch on all fours and rotate their heads You know the sort of thing This was called Miroirs (Mirrors) by Mark Godden a former resident choreographer Seventh Symphony by Toer van Schayk of Dutch National Ballet was at least joined-up dancing but executed with paste-on facial expressions Set to Seventh Symphony the dance meandered aimlessly as it struggled to match the magnitude of the music The dancers simply struggled Was it fair to put them through such a relentlessly tiring piece after most of them had already been dancing most of file night? Other Dancers Jerome pas de deux summed up the experience Here was Paris Opera Ballet guest artist Manuel Legris being virtuosic speedy funny and charmingly expressive and there was Evelyn Hart being bereft of lyricism That said it all London MmqneO 1667 London INwl Boeid IkL.